Everything's Changing

Well I'm back in the good old US of A until September, and it's nice to be back even if it's 100 degrees in Washington some days. Next semester I'll be working in Guangzhou, I'll talk more about that in my next post, but not only am I going to China my parents are as well. My dad took a posting with his paper in Beijing, he's been there for several months already, but now both he and my mom are going to be living there for about three years. They're renting there house, the places in the expat areas of Beijing are actually lot more expensive than I thought they'd be. Both my parents seem excited for the move, even my mom likes it more after seeing India it gives you a new perspective on what crazy means that makes China seem much more reasonable. My sister also is quitting her job in Madison and is going to backpack around South-East Asia. She might even end up in China for some time around, I just have to assure her that China's big enough she never has to bump into me. So coming in September the whole family might be in China. I've loved my time in China but I never thought my whole family would end up there. It's not that everyone is coming to China to live next to me, though I think my dad would be happy if I moved to Beijing, but I'm pretty sure if I hadn't been living in China everyone else wouldn't have ended up there. So that's me Daniel Davis trend setter.

To Everything There is a Season

I've got less than two weeks left in sunny old Alaer and things are really busy. I've still got to get a train ticket, my last paycheck, change my money, pack my stuff, give and grade a lot of finals, and teach a few extra classes. The semester is ending with a bang this time instead of the usual whimper since I don't have much time and there are a few places I want to go before I go back. My flight back to DC is on the 20th of June, but before that I am going to go to Kashgar, which is an old city famous for it's ancient buildings and gigantic Mosque. I'm also coming back to Changzhou for a few days to see my friends there and go to a wedding party Sean and Sarah are throwing. I'm really looking forward to seeing all the people in Changzhou again. After I booked my plane tickets, which was only after I told the school when I was thinking of leaving, the school turns around and asks me to stay longer to teach some other class. I told them I couldn't despite there repeated begging. It's annoying to deal with people who have mostly never taken a plane in there life and don't really have the concept of planning ahead more than a day in advanced. But everything seems mostly resolved now and the biggest problem I have is that I may not be able to transfer money home so I might have to travel around for a week with five or six thousand dollars in cash which isn't great, but China's a pretty safe country. Anyways I'll be home for the summer, until either August or September, pretty soon and I'm looking forward to it.

The End of Days

I've been following some funny new out of America where some crazy preacher with a radio station has been predicting the end of the world will be this Saturday the 21st at 6pm Eastern Standard Time, since God of course goes off Eastern Standard Time. The Times had a hilarious story about one family where the mom was really into this and the kids just sort of thought it was really embarrassing. No one in China has really heard of this but they all love the 2012 stuff. I don't know exactly why that's taken off so much, could be the movie, but I heard about it even before that came out. It might have something to do with there perception that there's an increase in the number of natural disasters, there really isn't people have just been paying more attention to them than normal. I think it has to do with living in a country with so little reliable information. If the government spends all it's time lying to you and censoring real information I imagine it gets hard to tell truth from fiction. In China both the truth and crazy rumors have to circulate in the dark corners of the internet or by word of mouth. In both cases the state controlled media downplays them. Maybe that's the unintended consequence of the government trying to control all media, China is now a nation of conspiracy theorists.

Computer Madness

Usually when I get up I check my e-mail and few other things before class. But yesterday when I went to start up my computer I was just met with a series of errors. No matter how well you take care of a computer sometimes things will just go wrong. I've been dealing with these sorts of computer problems since I was old enough to read, but being out here in Alaer adds another worrying dimension to the whole affair. Usually if something goes really wrong I could take my computer somewhere, even in Changzhou there were places I could have gone, or borrow another computer to help diagnose the problem, but out here in the middle of nowhere every time anything goes wrong with my computer I have this sinking feeling that I'll never be able to get it working again and have to spend the rest of my time in Alaer watching paint dry, or whatever the locals do for fun around here. I'm also worried about the effect all the endless dust in the air will have on the lifespan of my computer, but there's not much I can do about that. I was finally able to get it fixed but it took almost all day just to get it back to the way it was working the previous day and even then I lost some things. Well I guess I just have to hope that nothing more serious goes wrong, that or there's some kid here better with computers than I am.

Dora is Magic

One of my better students Dora has been mentioning for some time that she is the singer for a band on campus, and yesterday she invited me to come watch them preform outside the library. It was certainly interesting to see them preform, the music was more rock than I was expecting from the usually pop loving Chinese. The only problem was the whole thing took on a bit of a children's recital atmosphere as I was told it would start around 9pm only to have Dora not go on until 11pm and then only sing one song. That's a lot a watching Chinese music I don't really care at all about. Most of the people were doing covers of Chinese, or a few English songs, one group even did a Green Day song which I thought was funny. The song Dora did was a cover also but I don't really know the original Chinese song so it's all new to me. I got a video of her singing. The quality isn't very good but she's the one in the front. There group is called Magic, or 魔术 (Móshù)

Crisp and Cool

It's been raining in the desert for part of the past two days, and its been much much cooler than it was last week. Today I'm back to wearing a light sweatshirt and jeans, instead of the shorts and t-shirt I've been rocking for the last week. But one upside to this little rain interlude is that the air is amazingly fresh. We don't have the pollution of Eastern China to foul up the air, but especially this time of year the amount of dust that is kicked up into the air is enough that after it rains, and holds down all the dust a little, I'm amazed at how fresh the air is. It gets so I don't notice the dust until it's gone, but when it is it makes a huge difference. Everything also looks much cleaner today. The bikes which turn a sort of sandy brown from all the dust are at least somewhat cleaned off by the rain, as well as the trees, grass, and buildings which all accumulate dust really quickly. I'd like it to go back to being warm out, but a few days of fresh air are nice also.

The Internet is my TV

I don't have much in the way of TV or movies around here. There's no video store like in Changzhou, and while I have a TV I just don't spend much time in my living room and it only has one good channel. The end result is that I've downloaded more TV shows and movies this year then I ever have. Even with my slow connection I've downloaded probably 50 movies and dozens of season of TV. Some shows I watch only a few hours after they air on US TV. I've been keeping up with the new HBO show, Game of Thrones, which is great by the way, and the new season of Doctor Who the day they come out in the US. I always knew there was a lot of stuff on the internet but I've never been so cut off from any other way to get it before. I end up leaving my computer on a lot of nights just so I can download more stuff to watch. It can be a little weird to watch TV shows on the computer, the biggest problem is my computer screen has such a high resolution that unless I get the HDTV version of the show it doesn't look very good since I'm sitting so close. I don't know what I'd do without the internet though. I can go half way around the world, literally look at a globe, and still get all my shows.